


To Find A Conductor

by stillwaters01



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Linguistics, Music
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-07
Updated: 2013-09-07
Packaged: 2017-12-25 22:47:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/958492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillwaters01/pseuds/stillwaters01
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Uhura, looking at the Enterprise crew through the eyes of a musician and linguist, finds something special in McCoy’s role.</p>
<p>(Originally published 5/3/10)</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Find A Conductor

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Not mine. Just playing, with love and respect to those who brought these characters to life.
> 
> Written: 5/3/10
> 
> Notes: Written 5/3/10, revised 5/5/10 for clarity. I’m afraid I let my inner music geek fly on this one! A glossary of musical and linguistic terminology now follows the story for those interested. Thank you for your kind support as I explore this world.

 

 

Nyota Uhura’s strongest memory of her grandmother was of the proud woman’s strong hand cupping the back of her head.  “You may become anything here,” she gently tapped Uhura’s forehead, before moving her hand to the young woman’s heart, “but _here_ , you will always have a soul of music.”  Uhura remembered humming the tone of her grandmother’s chiming necklace as she walked to the garden, ready to officially accept Starfleet Academy’s xenolinguistics opportunity.  As she settled on the cool clay earth under the shade of the Faidherbia tree, the wind whispered through the branches in a soft, soothing supportive percussion, while the birds provided an enthusiastic high-pitched harmony.  Uhura smiled.  She had made the right decision.

 

Those first few months aboard the Enterprise were an exhilarating exercise in sight-reading.  Few beyond her grandmother understood the melding of music and language in her mind – how she saw movements and personalities in rhythmic bars of dancing notes, and felt the conductor’s baton guiding the vast symphony of galactic communication.  There was never a question of separation – music was language and language was infused with musicality…..and every person she met on the Bridge, whether they spoke another tongue or not, was a few unique bars of pitch and rhythm, another new, soaring burst of melody in a seemingly endless orchestration.

 

When Captain Kirk had asked her once, in that first year, how in the _world_ she had managed to accurately pick up a new, unknown ten-tone language so quickly, he hadn’t been satisfied by her honest, simple answer – that she “felt” it.  Kirk couldn’t understand how it wasn’t just a lucky hunch.  Uhura couldn’t understand how anyone could miss the subtle changes in pitch, the warm half-step up to a velar affirmative contrasting with the two-step drop to a nasal negative.  Everything about that species had spoken volumes – each step a perfect percussion to the melody of sounds, each stepped wave of the hand a tonal visual, each personality a singing instrument of its own.

 

Uhura loved the inherent challenge in the musicality of people – of finding the conductor.  Language tended to manage a complex melody without overt direction, but in a symphony the size of the Enterprise, there were so many languages, personalities, instruments and melodies…..

 

….. Spock’s precise movements echoing Vulcan’s characteristic glottal stops, while practiced fingers glided over the lyre’s strings with a passion all too human…..

 

….. Sulu’s tendency to name his plants in a comfortingly syllabic manner……

 

….. Scotty’s ever-ready brilliance thumping a steady, reassuring percussive base in the background, often over-looked but oh so important…..

 

By virtue of his position, Uhura had looked to the Captain as conductor, but while landing party orders could be the baton’s signal for those instruments’ entrance, or weighted decisions to launch photon torpedoes could be the seemingly casual wave of the conductor’s hand that brought shuddering tympanis to a deafening crescendo……it just hadn’t _felt_ right. 

 

Somewhere, her definition was lacking.  A conductor was more than the voice of musical orders. 

 

And so, she had continued to feel.

 

It was McCoy who first acknowledged her melody, who requested a solo performance.  While many had heard her singing and commented on the musicality of her Swahili-brightened lilt, she felt McCoy saw deeper than the obvious melody of those main instruments – that he _felt_ her – and that while he admittedly couldn’t define her particular instrument, that he saw its value in his own small ensemble, that he both had a piece for her to read and blank bars for her to fill.

 

And so, it was while singing for patients in sickbay that Uhura found two essences that were pure, melodic instrumentation.  She hadn’t felt such surety since singing at her grandmother’s sickbed when she was five years old…..where she realized for the first time that she not only _felt_ the musicality of that exhausted lilt, but that she _saw_ it as a set of fine crystal wind chimes. 

 

Christine Chapel defined the shakuhachi.  The breathiness of that ancient Japanese flute flowed through the nurse’s comforting presence - each time she came into a room, it was a breath of fresh air.  With each fight to advocate for her patients, she recalled the warrior monk, and with each moment after she left a room, the listener was reminded of the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness.  The flute’s Zen origins were reflected in her love – Uhura thought that one would have to be a little Zen to be in love with a Vulcan.

 

Then there was McCoy – pure, unadulterated Native American flute.  Made from and tied to the earth - the old country doctor.  Incorporated by master healers, created by a strong core of trained breathing and deep diaphragmatic regulation, vibrato was his healer’s compassion, while each breath led to a varied display of the instrument’s strong, expressive capabilities – a shout was a sharp staccato, casually brilliant breakthroughs a soaring high note, excited bouncing was wild 32nd note joy, despair at loss of life a low, mournful keening.  The nimble tongue that gave life to dancing 64ths was a series of sarcastic retorts and Georgian colloquialisms, the skilled fingers dancing over open holes practiced surgeon’s hands mending holes in flesh. 

 

Skilled hands coaxing life into raw material, drawled Georgia vowels guiding life into more than the sum of its parts.

 

Interpreting, encouraging, guiding.

 

…..It was in sickbay that she began to understand……when Kirk rushed in, McCoy in his arms, healer’s red stark against command gold, the rod of Asclepius felled by his oath.

 

….. It was there that Uhura found that the thumping drumbeats of terrified shouts match the thumping of your own heart in your ears, whether you’re the one shouting or not.

 

That the pulsing of an arterial bleed is eerily silent until the scattered sounds of blood drops hitting the cold floor match the sounds of your scattered thoughts hitting your skull.

 

That a seemingly welcome Southern drawl of a need to go home rings discordantly in a nurse’s internal score.

 

That panicked orders, the words “crash cart”, and the rolling of that cart all manage to hold the same desperate tone.

 

That sometimes the definition comes too late, that the conductor isn’t recognized by their presence, but rather their absence.

 

That the sum of the orchestra can’t always compensate, even for the loss of one flute.

 

That without the guide…..

 

….without _McCoy_ …..

 

…. That the shocked hush of disbelief is a fermata without hope of breath…

 

………The tears a discordant cacophony in their silence.

**Author's Note:**

> Final note: I felt a quick medical note was necessary for the line “That a seemingly welcome Southern drawl of a need to go home rings discordantly in a nurse’s internal score.” If a patient suddenly wakes up and says they have to go home (or use the restroom) it’s usually a very bad sign. For reasons unknown to me medically, that kind of insistence usually precedes a code. 
> 
> Musical Terminology:
> 
> Realizing this story relies heavily on musical terminology, I thought it might help to define some of the terms for clarity, in case anyone is interested.
> 
> \- Sight-reading = reading and playing a piece of music you have never seen/had the chance to practice before.  
> \- Bar = a segment of time defined as a given number of beats in a given duration. A score (sheet music showing the music for all parts and instruments at once) is made up of many bars.  
> \- Tympani = a type of drum that can be tuned to different pitches.  
> \- Crescendo = gradually growing louder.  
> \- Vibrato = small fluctuations in pitch produced by the diaphragm, used as an expressive way to intensify a sound.  
> \- Staccato = short, detached notes, played short and distinct.  
> \- 32nd note/64th notes = VERY fast. For example, if a whole note is 4 beats in duration, a 32nd note is 1/32 of that and a 64th note 1/64 of that.   
> \- Fermata = the prolongation of a tone or rest beyond its indicated time value.
> 
> Linguistic Terminology:
> 
> Since I also let my inner language geek out to play in this story, here are some linguistic definitions.
> 
> \- Velar = a sound articulated with the back of the tongue touching or near the soft palate, such as /g/ or /k/ in English.  
> \- Nasal = a sound articulated by allowing air to resonate in the nasal cavities and pass out the nose, such as /n/ or /m/ in English.  
> \- Tonal language = a language in which different tones distinguish different meanings (Mandarin Chinese is a modern example).  
> \- Glottal stop = a sound produced by a momentary complete closure of the glottis, followed by an explosive release. Often denoted by an apostrophe, it is similar to the pause in the middle of saying “uh oh.”  
> \- Sulu being comforted by syllabic names refers to Japanese being a language based on syllable structure (consecutive consonants are very rare).


End file.
